Paxton and the Gypsy Blade (4 page)

Bliss's head jerked around and he tried to climb to his feet. Giuseppe, a blade glinting in his hand, caught Bliss by the collar and dragged him off Adriana. Wanting only to escape, Adriana rolled into the far corner of the tent and huddled defensively.

Giuseppe circled Bliss to place himself between Adriana and her attacker. The knife inscribed a small circle inches from Bliss's face. “Tell me why I shouldn't kill you now, son of a dog,” he hissed. “Tell me why I shouldn't carve your face to ribbons and castrate you like the swine you are.”

“What's happening in here?”

Giuseppe looked up to see old Gregori framed in the entrance to the tent. The momentary distraction was all Bliss needed. Before anyone could stop him, he bowled Gregori over as he bolted from the tent.

“Giuseppe!” Adriana cried.

Stopped by her voice, Giuseppe hurried to kneel at her side.

“No, Brother,” she gasped. “He did not take me, I swear it.” She gripped his arm and wouldn't let him rise. “Do not try to stop him. He will only bring more trouble down on us. Stay with me, please. Help me to the wagon.”

Giuseppe retrieved her shawl from the back of her chair and arranged it over her breasts. “I should have killed him,” Giuseppe said, his rage turning to sorrow as he cradled his sister in his arms. “I am not a man. I should have killed him where he knelt!”

A loud, metallic click punctuated his sentence. “You should have,” Bliss said from the entrance, “but you didn't.”

Giuseppe had never used a firearm, but he knew the sound of one being cocked. “Hush, little one,” he said, gently releasing Adriana. Careful not to move fast, he turned slowly toward Bliss and the twin-barreled pocket pistol that was aimed at him. “If you shoot, Englishman,” he said calmly, “you will die. For my knife will find you …”

He was a blur of motion. His hand dipped to the sheath on his belt, rose smoothly, and loosed the deadly blade. At the same instant, Bliss fired. The shot was followed by a solid, sickening thump as a lead ball tore through Giuseppe's chest. His fingers clawing at the mortal wound, Giuseppe grunted in surprise and doubled over.

Bliss, smiling triumphantly, backed out of sight as Giuseppe collapsed.

“Oh, God!” Adriana sobbed, trying to stem the flowing blood with an embrace. “Oh, God, please!”

“Little one? Little one?” Disbelief written on his face, Giuseppe stared up at his little sister. “I'm sorry,” he rasped, and then he slumped wearily. The light in his eyes faded and flickered out, like a candle in the wind.

Her own pain was forgotten. “Giuseppe!” Adriana screamed, shaking him, trying to bring him back to life. “Giuseppe! No!” Dropping him, she half-crawled, half-ran to the entrance. “Murderer!” she howled into the night. “He murdered Giuseppe!”

Aroused by the sounds of the shot and Bliss's horse galloping away, men ran from every direction toward the tent. Old Gregori, momentarily dazed by the blow he had taken from Bliss, staggered to his feet and into the tent, now filled with acrid powder smoke and the stench of blood.

“Giuseppe is dead!” Adriana cried out in anguish to anyone who would listen. “My brother is dead!”

And then the world tilted crazily. Too late, she realized that she was falling. Footsteps pounded the earth around her, voices were raised in fearful questioning and alarm. There was an inviting pool of blackness in front of her that promised peaceful oblivion and escape from grief. Without hesitation, Adriana dived in, and slipped gratefully all the way to the bottom.

Gregori's voice was quiet and soothing. “Revenge is useless,” he said. “There is no justice for the Gypsy in the courts of the English. You know this, Adriana. Giuseppe himself would tell you as much.”

Adriana rested beside the wagon that until tonight she had shared with Giuseppe. She stared up at the stars, and made no reply to the elder's statement because she knew he was right. The Gypsies were tolerated in England because of the pleasure and diversion their fairs brought to normally dull lives, but they had no legal standing in a country where law and justice were rooted in a system based on ownership of real property, a concept completely foreign to her people. Attempting to bring charges against Bliss would be useless. And, deserving of vengeance though he was, killing him would only bring harm to the whole tribe.

“One day this man—this demon!—will go too far,” Gregori continued when Adriana did not speak. “His deeds will catch up to him, I swear it! Now, you must come away with us. You must go on with your life, Adriana, and put this terrible crime behind you. Giuseppe would want—”

Adriana whirled to face the old man, the icy control and calm she had demanded of herself ever since she had come up from that black pool of unconsciousness finally shattering. “Stop telling me what Giuseppe would want!” she blazed. “Giuseppe wanted to
live
, as we all want to live, but he is dead, and none of us can change that! All we can do for Giuseppe now is avenge his murder.” The Gypsies were readying to leave this place where death had visited them with his ghastly grinning countenance. Middle of the night or not, they were leaving after only one day of the fair. It was for the best, Gregori had decided. “Go with your people, old man!” Adriana said to him.

“They are your people, too,” he told her in a quavering voice. “You will take a man … have children. Life goes on, child!”

Adriana shook her head. Forgotten was Saul, forgotten the ties of blood and tradition that bound her to the tribe. “So it does, and so I shall,” she said with a voice as cold as a winter night. “But not here, for there are things I must do, and I have no wish to harm my people. The path I take can only be traveled alone.”

“You mean to kill this Lieutenant Trevor Bliss.” Gregori's words were a flat statement, not a question.

“I mean to avenge my brother's death.”

“But, child …” The old man was pleading now. “You know no other life.”

Adriana took a deep breath and looked to the stars again, her green eyes searching. “Then, perhaps,” she said, “it is time for me to learn another.”

CHAPTER II

“Tell me, lass, and be true, for it's my future you hold there.”

Work-worn and weather-cracked, the man's hand lay palm upward under Adriana's unwavering gaze. Cold seeped through the shuttered and rag-chinked window, hovered around the table and chairs set close by the hearth. Outside, the sky was dark with clouds and the ground with soot-stained snow. London in January was a dreary place.

The man across the table from Adriana was a tall, spare, hard-bitten sea captain in his mid-thirties. His hair was covered with a black knitted cap and his close-cropped beard trimmed his jawline with a fringe of brown shot through with white. His brows were thick, his eyes dark-brown and stern. Deep lines etched his face, which at one time might have been considered kindly, but by the year of our Lord 1810 could only be called hard and careworn. His name was Isaiah Hawkins, and he was desperately in need of counsel.

Isaiah had expected to find a withered crone when he set out to seek the Gypsy rumored to possess powers beyond those of the ordinary fortune-teller. Angel Street, where she lived, was lined with dilapidated buildings that housed charlatans who existed to cheat poor salts out of their hard-earned wages, and harlots who enticed the unwary to squander whatever money they had left for a moment of love and a lifetime of disease. Number 17 leaned precariously, and its front door was stuck open. The hall stank of an excess of unwashed humanity. The banister was missing from the wooden second-floor landing, which was decorated with the half-eaten, frozen carcass of a foot-long rat. When Isaiah's knock was answered, his surprise had been total, for—bundled though she was against the cold—there could have been no doubt that the Gypsy was anything but a crone.

“I see a white bird,” Adriana said at last, breaking the trancelike silence into which she had fallen. “A stately fowl that glides across the water.”

“A swan!” Isaiah gasped. “My ship, the
Swan of Yorkshire!
She rides at dock along River Street.”

“But not for long,” Adriana said. “The swan is free under a fair sky …”

“Aye, free. A comely brig, she is, eager to leave this black city in her wake. And if she never returns, it'll be soon enough for me.”

It required no seer to sniff out the despair that haunted him, the bitterness that poisoned his soul. “You've had troubles—more than your share,” Adriana murmured sympathetically.

“Troubles, hah! Yes, I'd call them that. A man is bilked of his profits by a lord of the realm. On the next voyage he springs so bad a leak he has to heave overboard a whole cargo of rice or be split in two when the damn stuff swells. And then I return from a hard nine months of dodging pirates and bring to port a load of prime tobacco, only to find the price is down and my creditors are trying to attach my beautiful
Swan
. And if that's not enough, my wife's run off with a tanner!” His face reddened and his eyes bulged. “A tanner, mind ye! A brown-handed, stinking landlubber of a tanner!”

“Perhaps you're better off without her,” Adriana suggested.

“And my cottage, too? That I worked and slaved for, and half-built myself with these two hands? Ahhh …” He stared at his hand a long moment, then suddenly pulled it free of Adriana's grasp. “What's the use? My course is set no matter what you say. The future's fairer elsewhere. I'll sneak some cargo aboard and sell it where I may. I've got plans.” He took out his purse, extracted a shilling, and dropped it on the table. “That's for your time and trouble, lass.”

Adriana slid the coin back to him. “Very little time and no trouble,” she said with a smile as warm as the room was cold. She stood and took two mugs from the mantel. “I'll not take money I haven't earned. Neither will I send a man into the cold without a spot of something hot to warm his stomach. Will you have a cup of tea with me?”

Isaiah stared quizzically at her, at last let himself lean back and relax. “Aye,” he said, his face softening, “it's been a long time since anyone's refused to take my money or offered me something for nothing.” His eyes crinkled with a rare smile. “I'll take that tea, lass, and gladly.”

The tea was hot and strong. Adriana warmed her hands on her mug and sat looking into the fire. “I wish you well, you know,” she said, her voice soft against the hiss of the fire. “It's not easy when the world turns against you.”

“No, it's not.” Isaiah propped his feet on the hearth, felt the tension drain from his joints. The coin lay untouched on the table. The girl's hair spilled silk-soft and deep-auburn from under her kerchief. Her lips, full and sensual in profile, invited kisses. Her emerald eyes—he could close his own and see them—had the power to delve into a man and set his soul to singing. His mouth dry, he glanced at the coin and then back to Adriana. “You could earn it yet,” he said.

Adriana sighed and looked around the apartment. The single room, not even her own, overlooked Angel Street. It was furnished with a broken-down chest of drawers and a rickety bed large enough for two, a table with one broken and splinted leg, a ladderback chair, and a stool. Three age-cracked wooden truncheons were propped on the mantel next to a small box that held four pewter spoons and a bone-handled knife. A candle in a rough wooden candlestick stood at each end of the mantel, and a third sat on the table, providing the room with its sole source of illumination. The only bright spot in the otherwise somber interior was a torn and threadbare multicolored quilt that covered the bed.

And so it comes to this
.… But what man, under the circumstances and considering the surroundings, wouldn't try to buy her? God only knew that others had tried, though usually—the comparison amused her—for much more than a shilling. “I don't want your money,” she said with a shy smile meant to ease his embarrassment.

Her quiet, unassuming dignity shamed him: he had offended her, and cheapened himself. Isaiah's face reddened. He lowered his eyes and then, realizing that he was staring at the soft line of her breasts under her heavy shawl, averted them altogether. “Your pardon,” he stammered. “'Twas an ill-conceived notion. I mean … oh, damn it all, what've I come to? I knew you weren't no tart. The apology of a fool carries little weight in this world, but it's the only kind I can offer. I'll not take the shilling, though,” he said adamantly. He stood and once again slid the coin toward her, then froze as she reached out and covered his hand with her own.

“Gypsy women give freely of themselves for pleasure or love, but not for money. I hold no ill will toward you. It was an easy enough mistake to make. Angel Street tends to do that to a man. And who knows? Perhaps if we'd met under different circumstances …” The room was cold and bleak, but her smile made it a cheerier place. “I'd guess a woman could expect many a pleasurable hour with a kind, handsome man such as yourself.”

Pleased by the compliment, Isaiah straightened his shoulders and smoothed the wrinkles out of his waistcoat. “You ought to quit this place, you know. Get yourself somewhere decent, with clean, fresh air and trees and sky.” The idea struck him so suddenly that he blurted it out without thinking. “Come with me, then! Quit this whole bloody black island. I've room for a fair lass like yourself aboard the
Swan of Yorkshire
. And no demands, either, save perhaps you read a palm or two for my lads.”

“Come with you?” Adriana asked, taken aback.

“Have you ever been to America? Or the Caribbean? They're far fairer places than this hellhole, by m'oath.”

Adriana almost laughed, but stopped herself when she saw his proposal was serious. “You're very kind,” she said gently, “but I can't. I couldn't possibly until …” Her mood darkened. “There's … something, a task I've got to finish. I'm sorry.”